Cheap email marketing that doesn't cut corners

What cheap email marketing actually costs

Cheap is a comparison, not a price, and in email marketing the comparison that matters is what you pay at the list size you will have in a year rather than the one you have today. Almost every email marketing service in this market charges by contact, so the advertised entry price describes a list you have already outgrown.

The pattern is consistent. An entry plan looks inexpensive at 500 or 1,000 contacts. At 10,000 the same platforms run somewhere between $60 and $150 a month, and at 50,000 several pass $300. You did not change anything about how you send; the number of stored addresses went up, and the bill followed. That is the mechanic behind almost every complaint about email marketing software getting expensive.

Send-based pricing breaks the link. Storing an address costs nothing, so a list that doubles does not double your cost, and cleaning your email list or keeping years of past customers on file is free rather than something you pay monthly to do. IGSendMail is $19 a month with unlimited contacts and 50,000 monthly sends, $49 for 200,000, and $99 for 300,000 — and none of those numbers move when your list grows.

The second cost people miss is the send limit. Several affordable email marketing tools cap monthly sends at a multiple of your contact tier, which is fine for one email newsletter a month and becomes a problem the moment you run a welcome email sequence, an abandoned cart flow and a monthly newsletter at the same time. A cheap plan you have to upgrade out of after eight weeks was not cheap.

What you should still get at the cheap end

The reason to be careful with cheap email marketing software is that the usual way to hit a low headline price is to withhold the features that make email work and sell them back on a higher tier. Four things are worth checking before you judge a price.

Marketing automation. If you cannot build a welcome email sequence, an abandoned cart flow and a re-engagement campaign on the plan you are buying, you are buying a broadcast tool. Automated flows are typically a small share of sends and a large share of revenue, so a plan without them is not a cheaper version of the product — it is a different, worse one.

A real email editor. A drag-and-drop email builder with responsive email templates that hold up in Outlook and on mobile, not a plain textarea. Everything on IGSendMail's paid plans includes the full editor and template library, and so does the free plan.

Transactional email through the same account. Receipts, password resets and booking confirmations must never fail. Running them through the same authenticated domain as your marketing, rather than a separate add-on with separate billing, is a deliverability decision as much as a cost one, because sender reputation accrues to the domain doing the sending.

Deliverability tooling. Automatic SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup, list verification, and bounce handling. Cheap email marketing services that leave authentication to you are cheap for a reason, and an email campaign in the spam folder costs more than the subscription saved.

Free plans, and which ones are actually free

Before paying anything, it is worth knowing that the free plan may cover you. The word covers two different things, though: a free trial is the paid product for a fixed period, and a free plan is a permanent tier. Only the second is a starting point rather than an evaluation.

Among the well-known free email marketing services, most cap contacts rather than sends, and most add their own branding to every message you send — which on a newsletter going to customers reads as exactly what it is. Several also withhold automation and the drag-and-drop builder from the free tier, so the free account cannot demonstrate the thing you are trying to evaluate.

The IGSendMail free plan covers 2,500 contacts and 3,000 emails a month, with the full email editor and template library, no credit card and no branding in your footer. It is capped on sending rather than on contacts, so growing your email list never pushes you onto a paid plan — only sending more does. For a local shop, a consultant or a restaurant sending a monthly email newsletter, that is a finished tool rather than a countdown.

Free-plan allowances change across this market without announcement. Confirm the current figures on each vendor's own pricing page before you commit, including ours.

How to keep the cost down once you are sending

The largest saving available to most senders is not a cheaper plan. It is not paying to store and mail people who will never buy.

Suppress subscribers who have not opened anything in a year. On contact-based pricing you are paying for them every month; on any pricing you are paying for them in deliverability, because a large unengaged share of your list weakens the engagement signals mailbox providers use to decide whether your email reaches the inbox at all.

Verify addresses at signup so typos never enter the list and hard bounces stay low. Clean the list before any large import.

And send to segments rather than to everyone. Sending your whole list every campaign is what raises unsubscribes, raises complaints and eventually raises the real cost of email — which is not the subscription, but the campaigns that stop arriving.